ICAR Becomes a School: Reflections on the past and looking to the future

In December, 2010, the University Board of Visitors, following similar action by the Faculty Senate and with the support of President Merten and Provost Stearns, voted to change the name of ICAR from Institute to School. In one sense, this marked the end of a decades-long journey of ICAR’s growth and development.
I arrived at George Mason University in 1980, as an assistant professor hired to teach undergraduate anthropology.  I joined a faculty group from all the various social science departments (save economics), who were considering the possibility of starting the first postgraduate program in the world devoted to conflict resolution. The group was chaired by Thomas Rhys Williams, then graduate dean, and had the crucial support of the canny chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Joseph Scimecca. The patronage of the graduate dean and the support of a key social science chair especially in a new, tradition-free and institutionally pliant university, meant that what was then the Center for Conflict Resolution would grow very quickly. The new program was incubated and nurtured inside Scimecca’s department in its formative years, and he became ICAR’s first director.  In 1981 Dennis Sandole arrived from the UK to be appointed the Center’s first dedicated faculty member. By 1982, the Master of Science degree had been approved, a curriculum was in place, the first cohort of master’s students arrived, and some faculty began to orient their research and writing specifically toward the emergent discipline. The PhD degree followed in 1988.

A key event in the Center’s development was its elevation from Center to Institute, coinciding with the formation of several institutes as independent, autonomous academic units at George Mason University.  These institutes were created with directors who held the rank and functioned like deans. Rich Rubenstein was ICAR’s director at the time (1989-1990), and immediately saw the great advantage to having ICAR function with complete independence from larger college structures, imperious deans, or baronial department chairs with turf to protect – or expand. Over the years some of the institutes created in the early 1990s developed into schools of their own - public policy and visual and performing arts among them - and some, failing to thrive, were absorbed into larger units, or simply disappeared. Yet ICAR remained, until very recently, the only academic institute, the smallest unit on campus to award degrees, hire and promote faculty, and determine its own development and direction. Because of its nstitutional independence and extremely flat bureaucratic structure succeeding directors and faculty were able to respond to changes in the emergent field of conflict resolution. Even as, in significant ways, we helped to evolve the field as an academic enterprise.

If it seems as if I’m exaggerating in that last claim it is, I think, only a little. Of course there were scholars interested in conflict resolution, practitioners working as mediators, and a handful of journals devoted to the field. But to start and sustain the first degree-granting program required a vision of a coherent field of study, a conceptual commitment to developing conflict resolution theory based on empirical research, and connecting all this to worlds of practice. From the beginning, ICAR faculty responded by producing research and writing articles and books that literally populated the curriculum and reading lists at ICAR.  These documents would become important texts in many other conflict programs and institutions as the field as a whole grew. Examples include the first books devoted to conflict management and problem solving, (Sandole and Sandole-Staroste, 1987), culture and conflict resolution (Avruch, Black, and Scimecca, 1991), and the application of conflict resolution theory to practice (Sandole and van der Merwe, 1993).

Jim Laue joined ICAR as the first Lynch Chair and, along with Wallace Warfield, anchored our commitment to practice. John Burton’s arrival to teach here in 1990 brought a major theorist and practitioner, and his three “conflict volumes” (St. Martin’s Press, 1990, 1991), completed during a senior fellowship year at the U.S. Institute of Peace. Written with ICAR PhD Frank Dukes, these books helped establish “basic human needs” as ICAR’s signature contribution to the field, even as (or especially as) it gave rise to productive debates within ICAR itself. This tradition of creating the field through writing the field has continued, with work connecting conflict resolution to peace studies (Jeong, 2000), comparative peace processes (Mitchell, 2000), the so-called ICAR textbook (Cheldelin, Druckman and Fast, published in 2003 with a second edition in 2008), the latest comprehensive handbook to review the state of the field as a whole (Sandole et al., 2009), and work on citizen diplomacy and the vicissitudes of practice that holds ICAR to its original commitment of linking theory and research in the academy to conflict resolution practice in the world (Gopin, 2009). Of course, this is just a sample of the important work produced over the years by our faculty, and to name and record all of it would make this brief offering of Whig history even more immodest.

Nevertheless, it was not just faculty who did this work. As mentioned, Frank Dukes, just then getting his PhD, worked with Burton on the conflict volumes. Hugo van der Merwe, likewise a doctoral student, collaborated with Sandole on the important 1996 collection, and the co-editor of the ICAR textbook Larissa Fast, has gone on to teach conflict studies at Notre Dame. In many ways, it is the success of our graduates, at both the masters and doctoral levels, and in years to come from our much newer undergraduate program as well, more than the publications of the faculty, that testifies best to ICAR’s role in helping to birth the academic field. ICAR graduates have gone on to distinguished careers in t aching, research and practice.  The first conflict resolution program in Turkey was begun by ICAR graduate Nimet Beriker;  the vice president of the UN mandated University for Peace, Amr Abdalla, is an ICAR graduate; the dean of the new Kroc School of Peace Studies at the University of San Diego, William Headley, also studied here for a time. To try and list all of the graduates of ICAR who have gone on to work in development, education, peacebuilding, human rights, trauma relief, ADR, and other aspect of conflict resolution and transformation, would be an even more daunting task than trying to name faculty.

It would be a mistake to end this article simply reflecting upon past accomplishments, inferring that ICAR’s journey is at an “end.” Becoming The School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution serves to not only institutionally certify what has been the state of affairs for more than two decades. It recognizes the more recent growth of ICAR, with the addition of undergraduate and certificate programs, into a “full-service” degree-granting autonomous academic unit within George Mason.  Designation as a school is a signifier to the outside world, including potential donors and other supporters of our work, that we are a permanent and an integral part of George Mason University’s mission. Finally, becoming a school signifies to us, faculty, students, and alumni, the challenges that we continue to face in trying to respond as scholars, researchers, and practitioners, to a world beset by violence and destructive conflict. We struggle with connecting “theory to practice” today, as we did in the early 1980s when the idea of ICAR was first raised, and the first groups of students trusted a new faculty (and each other), with their education. We struggle with making “conflict resolution” make sense in a world that remains dominated by conceptions of power politics and the practice of war. We struggle with genocide prevention in a world where, not so long after ICAR was established, concentration camps reappeared in Europe and millions perished in Rwanda and the Sudan. Becoming a school means, in large part to many of us, asserting that the struggle continues.